Organizations these days have a huge amount of data related to various aspects of their business, such as employees, business partners, operations, and management, stored in different databases. Databases are organized into tables having rows and columns of data. A table represents a group of related pieces of information. Each piece of information in a table is referred to as a column and each row includes a set of column values.
Data stored in the databases is often used for different purposes, such as testing, training, demonstration, and data research, and may be accessed by people within the organization as well as outside the organization. The databases contain both sensitive and non-sensitive data. Accordingly, care needs to be taken to ensure that at least the sensitive data is inaccessible to unauthorized people, either from within the organization or from outside. A failure to do so may result in the theft of data or unnecessary disclosure of sensitive information. For example, a database used for a bank may include data, such as name, account number, credit card number, debit card number, and address of the customers. In many scenarios, to carry out the day-to-day operations of the bank, the data may be made accessible to certain authorized employees, with access being restricted for other employees. However, in many situations, such as for training and testing purposes, the database may have to be shared with other employees, even if they are not authorized to access the data. This may lead to disclosure of sensitive data.
Conventionally, data masking techniques have been used to protect the data. In data masking techniques, the data which is not to be disclosed to everyone is replaced with dummy data. The dummy data looks like the original data but is not the original data.